What is Magic?

I once counseled a friend of mine who was in an extremely dysfunctional marriage, “I think you’re demon-possessed.  Even though I know you don’t believe in demons, just for the hell of it why don’t you go to the holy Mayan cave, light a candle, and ask the spirit of the place ‘If, on the off chance, I am indeed possessed by demons, please cast them out.’”  She did this and reported later that the moment she said those words her candle flickered even though there was no wind, and a pain – like an ice pick – shot through her head.  What happened next in her life was that she split up with her husband.  My interpretation of this is that without the demon’s protection she was too vulnerable to handle the Punch and Judy show she was involved in, so she terminated the relationship.  In other words, just casting out demons that may be possessing you doesn’t automatically make you any happier.  It just makes it possible for you to become happier.  But there’s no way to get even to square one until you clear the demons out of the way.   

            Luckily it’s pretty easy to cast demons out of yourself.  All that’s required is the desire to do so, and the firm decision to get rid of them.  If you are suffering from a chronic or incurable disease, or are battling against some form of addiction, then casting out demons is the first step in self-healing.  It’s the first step in self-healing for most of us, since so many of us are demon-possessed.  Until you get rid of any demons that may be possessing you and reassert control over your own intent, you can never get beyond square one.   

            To cast out demons, go to whatever place you are accustomed to pray at.  Power spots or power trees are good places to do this, especially if you have faith in the power of the place or tree to brace your spirit.  Light a candle and ask the deity to whom you usually pray that, if there happens to be a maleficent influence in your life, to please cast it out!   You must make this prayer in a true spirit of decisiveness and determination.  If you pray in a spirit of doubt or hesitation, the demon will use your vacillation to defeat your prayer.   

Demons are always trying to convince you that you are doing everything possible to make yourself happy.  All the while they undermine your efforts.  They keep pulling you back to square one.   A wishy-washy prayer to cast out a demon may make you believe that you’ve accomplished something, but the demon will weasel past it.  Thus demons have to be cast out in a mood of unbending intent and decision.   That’s all that’s required – unbending intent to cast the demon out.  Jumping up and down and shaking your body vigorously is another way to cast them out.  This is a good way to get rid of bad moods or the bad vibes other people lay on you as well. 

            How will you know whether your exorcism worked?  Successful exorcisms are often accompanied by sensations of something that was inside you leaving.  There may be some kind of whoosh of something flying out of you and away.  But this isn’t always true.  One way you’ll know is that in the next few days you’ll feel lighter, more hopeful and optimistic.  Your friends will notice the difference too:  they’ll remark on how much better you look or feel.   

            If there’s any doubt, though, you can always repeat the exorcism.  Just make sure to do it in a mood of decisiveness and determination.  That’s all, it’s not difficult.   

(excerpted from Magical Almanac, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanacCopyright © 2007 by Bob Makransky.  All rights reserved) 

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            I’ve cast demons out of people and also out of buildings they were inhabiting.  I don’t like doing this, though, because it scares me.  When the demons are cut loose they dive into the nearest host they can grab onto.  The time I cast demons out of a building where black magicians had lived previously, I followed my spirits’ advice and lit a censer with copal incense.  Then I circled the building repeating an appeal to the demons to leave:  “You are not wanted here anymore, you’ll be a lot happier in another place where you are more appreciated.  In the name of the nine Mayan gods (my patron spirits) I cast you out!”  I tried to muster confidence which I didn’t actually feel for the “I cast you out!” part.  Then at each corner of the building I set off a chain of firecrackers, since demons have highly refined sensibilities and dislike clamor.  After the firecrackers went off at the first corner I could sense something coming loose.  By the last corner I sensed they were completely loose.   

I then left, but as I walked away I started talking nervously to my assistant about the ritual we had just performed, “Hey, that really worked, didn’t it?”  At that instant I sensed something diving into me, which really freaked me out.  I started jumping up and down to shake whatever it was out of me, and at the same time I forced myself to think about something else, to blank my mind.   Ever since then I try to avoid casting out demons.  When it is absolutely unavoidable I do it in a place where I am protected, a nearby cave which is a Mayan holy place.  I certainly don’t advise casting demons out of other people unless you’ve got spirit helpers in whom you have the utmost faith, such as Jesus, Krishna, or Buddha, backing you up. 

 I’m of the opinion that people should cast out their own demons.  They called them in, and they should take the responsibility for casting them out themselves.  The exception to this would be in the cases of children or people who are too crazy to do it for themselves.    

Sometimes people ask me, “I think my parent (or spouse or loved one) might be demon-possessed.  Is there anything I can do to cast it out?”  My usual answer is negative.  Demons won’t leave if the host doesn’t want them to leave, or they’ll immediately return if cast out.  In our society most people don’t even believe in the existence of demons, much less seriously entertain the possibility that they themselves could be possessed.  Moreover, most people, especially old people, have become comfortable with their demons.  They’re afraid to have to start living their own lives and making their own decisions again.  It’s easier just to be uptight and miserable and wallow in self-pity.  Bit-by-bit they surrender all their joy to their demons, until in the end the demons are all that’s left.   

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Demons taught us humans how to think because thinking requires concentrated effort.  This effort, or being uptight – hiding shame from the past and seeking glory in the future – allows demons to suck human energy.   

This is why adults are usually more uptight than little children, who aren’t yet in a mode of constant thinking.  We adults are completely accustomed to thinking every second all day long.  We don’t realize how much we have to squelch ourselves and our true feelings down in order to maintain this inner dialogue.  This constant thinking, particularly when it’s worried, or angry, or jealous thinking, provides fodder for the demons who surround us.   

In other words, the invention of agriculture wasn’t so much a matter of humans beginning to farm plants and animals for food as it was demons beginning to farm humans for food.   Now, after millennia of breeding us, the demons have us right where they want us.  Earlier generations of humans were hardy, robust, and self-reliant, which is hard fare for demons to digest.  We moderns with our undisciplined, self-indulgent lifestyles have become a toothsome delight for the demons who suck us.  We are fat and complacent, with no minds or wills of our own.  This makes us easy to herd around and lead to the slaughter.      

Our demon masters, who were overjoyed when humans invented agriculture and became a semblance of them, are presently ecstatic that humans have adopted an urban society wholly disconnected from nature.  We are turning the green, loving earth into a hell world.  At least, when most humans were doing agriculture, they were still attached to the earth’s love and the rhythms of the universe.  Now, urban society has cut humans off completely from the earth’s love.  When does anyone even look at a tree anymore except through a speeding windshield or a television screen?   And the food – the soylent green – which people today eat from supermarkets, …  Welcome to hell, folks!  You don’t have to wait until you die.  Hell is right here, right now.   The worst part of it is that most people have been trained to call this heaven.   And the demons are eating it up.  Eating us up. 

            There was nothing wrong with us humans having associated ourselves with demons for the past few millennia.  We learned a lot from them.  We learned how to think, for starters.  Now it’s time we humans went our own way and followed our own star, because continuing to serve our demon masters will just lead to our own destruction as a species. 

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Prior to the invention of agriculture after the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, humans were more or less like any other apes.  They were more intelligent than most other animals, but not particularly smart.  My guides have told me that if we could meet one of our ancestors from that period, we would consider it an animal.  There’s no level upon which we modern humans would consider those ancestors to be human beings.    

It was an alliance that the human race forged with the race of demons during the Upper Paleolithic – early Mesolithic era that made us modern humans the thinking, rational animals we are today.  It was at that time that trapping, fishing, and hunting with dogs were invented – ensnaring game instead of hunting it directly.  Then agriculture was invented – raising animals and plants instead of gathering them directly.   Demons channeled new technologies to the human race through individuals who were inventors and innovators.  They still do.   

These indirect techniques for getting food necessitated a greater sense of planning for the future than direct hunting / gathering had required.   The new social order demanded a new type of consciousness:  perception and cognition tied to linear time.  Planning for the future is what creates the future.  Until the demons taught us about the future, all human beings had to work with was the now moment.  

Linear time is the matrix of our separated, lower self.  Our human ancestors, like infants, didn’t have anywhere near as much sense of separatedness as we do.  They were not as individuated as we are today.  They lived in a more timeless frame of mind, a sense of belonging to the universe.  Their mental process wasn’t a matter of constant thinking, but rather of direct knowing what their ancestors, spirits, and the earth were telling them.  They felt themselves to be part of an ongoing, natural process in the same way that we feel ourselves to be part of our society.   Because they were not as separated as we are today, they felt less Angst than we do, because they had no future to worry about. 

Our sense of linear time is the product of our linear thinking.  If we stop thinking so much, like ancient humans and infants, then the past and future lose much of their meaning.   They are just not as important, so they are not as there.     

If the future didn’t exist, would we care about it?   It’s precisely our caring and worrying about the future that conjures up its existence.  We care about the future, it’s important to us, because we believe there’s glory for us somewhere in our future.  We believe that someday we will win the lottery, or find our true soul-mate, or become famous, or go to heaven when we die.  These sorts of expectations are what trap us into striving towards a future which never arrives.   The other side of that coin is our past, the things that we are ashamed of and are trying to forget about (and would never reveal to another person).  That striving towards a future and away from a past is what creates the illusion that there is such a thing as a future and a past.  When striving ends, so too does linear time.   

Our higher selves are timeless.  Higher self is eternal:  it is our touch with the Spirit.  Higher self has to be squelched down into the straitjacket of linear time in order to create our uptight, niggling little lower self.   We learned how to create a sense of linear time – a separated, lower self which is caught in a loop of constant self-reflection – from our demon masters.   Over the past millennia the demons have taught us everything that we modern humans consider human.   That is to say, our civilization – all of our thinking – is demonic in origin.  The qualities that we modern humans believe elevate us above the realm of animals are essentially demonic qualities.   

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            What are demons like?  They’re like us humans, but are far more intelligent and cunning, and also sleazier.  They’re also really touchy, uptight, and self-important.  They hate being ignored, and absolutely freak out at being laughed at.   The demons which I have met face-to-face, in dreaming, appeared like normal people, but there was something very slimy about them.  That is how I knew who they were.   

Most of my encounters with demons were oblique.  I could feel their presence because I would start getting angry for no reason.  This is because I’m an angry person:  a fearful person they would make fearful, a lustful person they would make lustful, and so on.   

Demons are basically everywhere.  For example, when we are driving and another driver cuts in right ahead of us and we beep the horn in anger, that’s in fact an exchange between that guy’s demons and our own.  Some psychopaths like Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Ted Bundy, got their dazzling, hypnotizing charm from the demons which possessed them.  Other psychopaths like Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein were bestial thugs.  What demons often give their hosts is an extraordinary cunning and a feeling for the jugular.  They sense precisely how far they can go and what they can get away with; and they have no scruples whatsoever about destroying anyone or anything that gets in their way.   

            Not all demon-possessed people become world leaders, of course, and not all are psychopathic.  Many people who are depressed, repressed, angry and irritable all the time, constantly ill, addicted to drugs or sex or whatever, self-destructive generally, are possessed by demons.  You can stand in a supermarket and watch the demon-possessed people go by:  the harried mother pulling her kid in tow as she shops, yelling at the kid and yanking his arm out of its socket to drag him away from the things which normal curiosity leads him to explore;  the old geezer with a perpetual scowl, pushing his shopping cart aggressively with an “out of my way, buddy!” expression on his face; the care-worn, overburdened, downtrodden people dragging themselves up and down the aisles.   

It’s not too hard to tell if people are demon-possessed when they get old.  When they are still young, there’s usually enough of the original person left there so that you can’t see the demons as readily.  As the people get older, however, the demons eat up more and more of their souls and their joy.    

If, as people age, they get lighter and more joyous, then they’re not demon-possessed.  On the other hand if they get more uptight, nastier, depressed, or more self-pitying as they age, then they probably are demon-possessed.  This is why it’s so hard to deal with those old people – you’re not dealing with the person anymore, just with a demon.  

            Demons are not evil.  They’re doing what they have to do in order to eat, just like the rest of us.  There is no evil per se in the universe.  If you want to call the necessity of killing and devouring other beings in order to survive evil, then the one you’ve got to blame for this is the One who made that rule in the first place.  That was not Satan.  Demons have to eat just like everybody else.  What demons eat is what we call feelings, especially uptight feelings.   

            What makes being a demon, or messing around with demons, evil is that there’s no real joy or happiness in it.  The way they feed themselves, and the way we feed ourselves under their influence, is uptight and ugly.  It’s a big rush of self-importance, and then lots of pain.  Then another big rush of self-importance, and then lots of pain.  It’s a spiral of self-importance and pain.  It’s not very peaceful or pleasant.  But it can’t properly be characterized as evil per se.  It’s an extremely popular lifestyle for humans as well as demons.   It’s called society. 

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In our society the stigma attached to believing in demons is quite strong.   Anyone who admits to believing in demons is considered crazy or stupid, or perhaps evil, and is no longer taken seriously.   However, our society’s view of this issue is incorrect.  Becoming a magician requires facing up to this truth and dealing with it, not sweeping it under the rug.  Magicians have to deal with how things really are and not worry about what other people might think or say about them.     

The trouble with all of the false stereotypes of black magic and demons in the popular media, particularly that these things don’t exist, is that they prevent us from understanding what is really going on.  As many fundamentalist Christians rightly believe, demons are everywhere.  In fact, they run the whole shebang.   

            When we talk about demons, we’re not talking about Transylvania.  We’re talking about trouble right here in River City.  Demons are pretty much all over the place, and they run our society.  The government, media, academia, churches – indeed, all of our precious institutions – are of the demons, by the demons, and for the demons.  The movie The Matrix is actually a pretty good picture of what our society is really like, but with demons rather than machines behind the scenes pulling the strings.  Like germs, demons are everywhere.  Therefore, they are not something to be frightened of or worried about.  In fact, the people who are the most freaked out by demons, such as Inquisitors and witch hunters, are usually the most demon-possessed themselves.  Likewise, the people who are the most uptight about black magic are usually the ones who are doing the most black magic themselves.  Most demon-possessed people, like most black magicians, consider themselves to be upstanding, righteous, pious citizens.   

Many people in our society are demon-possessed.  Indeed, it’s quite possible that you may be demon-possessed.   I was possessed for the first 40 years of my life, until my spirit guides pointed that fact out to me and explained to me how to cast them out.  It’s no big deal, really, either to be possessed or to cast demons out.  This will be explained later. 

            Here’s a fictional example which illustrates how people unconsciously call demons in to possess them, taken from John O’Hara’s novel Appointment in Samarra.    Notice how Julian English’s wife calls in a demon of her own in response to Julian’s demon: 

            “He did.  What’s the use of trying to fool myself?  I know he did.  I know he did and no matter what excuses I make or how much I try to tell myself that he didn’t, I’ll only come back to the same thing:  He did.  I know he did.  And what for?  For a dirty little thrill with a woman who – oh, I thought he’d got all that out of his system.  Didn’t he have enough of that before he married me?  …  Ah, Julian, you stupid, hateful, mean, low, contemptible little son of a bitch that I hate!  You do this to me, and know that you do this to me!  Know it!  Did it on purpose!  …  You big charmer, you.  You irresistible great big boy, turning on the charm like the water in the tub; turning on the charm like the water in the tub; turning on the charm turning on the charr-arm, turning on the charm like the water in the tub.  I hope you die. 

            “I hope you die because you have killed something fine in me, suh.  Ah hope you die.  Yes-suh, Ah hope you die.  You have killed something mighty fine in me, English, old boy, old kid, old boy.  What Ah mean is, did you kill something fine in me or did you kill something fine.”   

            This example is a good illustration of the way in which people call in demons to possess them when they feel especially vulnerable and in need of drastic protection.  In most cases the appeal to demons is unconscious.  Once demons are called in, whether consciously or not, they don’t leave unless they are deliberately exorcised.   

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This very sentiment is often expressed by people who lose their lower self willy-nilly after a near brush with death.  They say things like, “Now, I’m just taking it one day at a time.”  What they are saying is that their eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with their death has forced them to drop their self-pity: their customary moods and concerns.  They lighten up, stop clinging to things, stop resenting the past and worrying about the future.  They become more selfless (closer to Higher Consciousness).   

Higher Consciousness means that, while both good and bad things still happen to the person, there’s not as much of a “me” there that things are happening to.  There’s less personal stake in what happens.  Situations just unfold under their own momentum.  Things are taken in stride – philosophically, not personally.    

Erasing self-pity is not easy or fun; indeed, it’s quite painful.  St. John of the Cross characterized it as the Dark Night of the Soul.  Since it is our mind, our constant thinking, which stabilizes our reality and which brings the waking world into focus, erasing it means losing our mind.  Acting with Higher Consciousness means letting go of everything that we cling to; and of course sanity is one of those things.   

Another way of looking at our lower self is to think of it as consisting of concentric rings of decreasing importance, like the layers of an onion.   The brain is at the center.  The rest of the body forms the next ring.  Possessions and intimate relationships form another ring.  Religion, country, hobbies, favorite sports team are an outer ring; and so on.  If any of these rings are threatened, then most people feel that their self is threatened.    

Take, as an example, how most Americans felt about the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.  They felt as though they, personally, had been attacked.  Thus it is true to say that to most Americans, the World Trade Center was a part of what they considered to be their self. 

From the point of view of Higher Consciousness, however, the self is everything.  In other words, to get to our Higher Consciousness, instead of using our brain and body as a central point of reference, we use the world as a whole.  To actually make this shift is not an intellectual feat but an emotional one.  It involves opening our hearts – having compassion for everything instead of just our onion rings.   To connect to your higher consciousness, try using this creative visualization: 

Feel that you are truly connected to the universe;That you have been chosen to save the world; That you have been chosen to reach out to every being that comes in contact with you;That your love knows no bounds and gives you joy such as you never thought was possible. 

Then go on to visualize how this is being expressed in ways that you would prefer.  You can alter the basic formula at will to make it more meaningful to you personally.   Do this visualization twice daily.  You should become imbued with this visualization, thinking and feeling it all day long, like daydreaming, but in the present tense.  Also every day you must sense your connectedness to all that is around you and to everyone you meet.  Reject nothing and no one who comes your way.  Little-by-little you’ll take possession of your Higher Consciousness and shed the lower one.   

(excerpted from Magical Almanac Ezine.  Copyright © 2007 by Bob Makransky, all rights reserved). 

More of Bob Makransky’s articles are posted at:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MagicalAlmanac/files  

This constant internal dialogue of self-pity makes us believe that there is a continuing, abiding “me” there. The constant thinking and agitation about a “me,” is what creates that “me” – a shameful, glorious, shameful, glorious, shameful, glorious “me.” That “me” doesn’t even exist in the eyes of other people; it merely exists in our fantasies of how we believe other people see us. How much more flimsy could the thing be?

As we intend to stop pitying ourselves – as we gradually lose our feelings of shame about the things which have happened to us and our seeking glory in the eyes of other people – we also lose our sense of there being a “me” there to whom things are happening. If we no longer particularly care one way or the other about what happens, things no longer happen “to me”; they just happen, period. Our lower self then begins to disintegrate and our Higher Consciousness emerges. As it does so, our everyday, waking life becomes more like dreaming: more vivid and alive and full of meaning.

Most people in their daily lives rarely operate with Higher Consciousness. In most people’s lives Higher Consciousness only surfaces now and then in response to emergencies and sudden, unexpected events. Higher Consciousness emerges to save our lives; to pull us back from the brink; and to warn us away from certain people, situations, and places. Higher Consciousness sees an opportunity and grasps it without hesitation or doubt of any sort.

When we operate with our Higher Consciousness, we are mentally clear, coldly efficient, pitilessly detached, and utterly determined. We no longer feel like our usual, lower selves – trapped in our petty little moods and concerns. Rather, we are exhilarated and free. When our Higher Consciousness surfaces it brushes aside all our doubts and fears. We no longer fear death, and we never say die. In a manner of speaking, our Higher Consciousness is actually the same thing as our death. When society teaches us fear of death, what it is teaching us is fear of our Higher Consciousness. Our Higher Consciousness is a state of unfettered limitlessness, just as our lower self is a state of crabbed dissatisfaction and torpor, symbolized by the prison of the body.

Our Higher Consciousness acts from the gut, not the mind. Our Higher Consciousness doesn’t operate on social conditioning – at least not in our decadent, self-indulgent society. Higher Consciousness was the basis of training in warrior societies which existed on this earth in ancient times. Even as recently as a century ago humans were more robust, self-reliant, and daring (closer to Higher Consciousness) than we self-coddling moderns are.

Our Higher Consciousness acts on our true feelings, not on our thought forms. We cultivate our Higher Consciousness by not indulging our customary moods and concerns – by cultivating the attitude that nothing that happens or doesn’t happen is all that important.

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We mistakenly believe that our body is the source of our suffering, but in fact it is our suffering that is the source of our body.  Our body is “made of” self-pity; that’s what gives it its apparent solidity.  Without self-pity when you bang it, it still hurts; but it doesn’t hurt “me;” it just hurts, period.   The sense of there being a solid “me” there is simply self-pity, which we have learned from our parents and society. 

Self-pity – focusing attention on a “self” – consists of nervous habits like the tensing ourselves up that we feel all the time we are awake; the need to be zipping about, fidgeting and fuming, attending to this or that urgency.  Self-pity is the defensive wall we feel up against other people when we’re having sex with them, or even just talking to them.   Self-pity is the attitude we put on when we wake up every morning, and the mask with which we greet life and other people all day long.  If we were to wake up one day in someone else’s moods and concerns, with a wholly different set of self-pity agendas, we’d feel thoroughly disoriented.  We’d think we’d been jettisoned into an alien universe.    

Our self-pity – the feeling we conjure up with our customary moods and concerns – doesn’t really belong to us at all.  We’ve merely learned it from our parents and society.   Yet that is what we identify as our self, and defend with every fiber of our being.   Most of us are so wrapped up in our self-pity that we don’t usually understand this vital point:  that there is a Higher Consciousness there behind the self-pity.  That’s why we cling so hard to our self-pity:  we’re afraid that that is all that stands between us and annihilation.    

In a nutshell, self-pity consists of comparing ourselves to others:  feeling superior to others, judging and criticizing others, and expecting things from others.  In other words, self-pity exists only in relation to other people.  This is a very important point:  what most people consider to be their “self” is a socialized phenomenon.  Newborns do not have self-pity.  They don’t have a central point of reference, a sense of where they end and other begins.  To newborns things are moment-to-moment, and everything is one.  There’s no abiding, continuing, separated “me” there.   

Self-pity is like a piece missing out of a jigsaw puzzle.  It is wholly defined by the others surrounding it.   It is precisely the belief that we’re better than other people that makes us no better than other people.  That belief is what traps us in our lower selves and hence our bodies.  It is the wall that separates being awake from dreaming.   

Our self-pity is created by our constantly thinking thoughts of shame and glory.   If we analyze our habitual thinking, we will realize that it consists mostly of thoughts about the past and future.  Thoughts about the past evoke feelings of shame, of embarrassment, of things which we try to hide from other people and to forget about ourselves.  Thoughts about the future evoke feelings of glory, in which we revel in fantasies of approbation and vindication from other people – winning the lottery, or being famous, or finding our true love, or going to heaven when we die.   Hiding shame and seeking glory are the engine which motivates all our social striving.  Our thoughts of shame and glory make us believe that we are separate and unique and special – that we have self-existence, that the universe revolves around us.   

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When we use the term “Higher Consciousness” we are not talking about some alien form of mindset attainable only after thirty years of meditation in a cave in the Himalayas.  Higher Consciousness is the mindset with which we were born:  the joy, contentment, and feeling of at-one-ment which was our everyday mind when we were infants and young children.   In most of us adults, Higher Consciousness has been largely replaced by self-pity.  In other words, what we mistakenly believe to be our “self” is merely self-pity in one or another of its forms (shame or glory).

We can get a clue as to what our social training does to us by observing newborns.  Although newborns occupy a physical body from our point of view, that’s obviously not the newborns’ point of view.  Newborns don’t have a sense of being centered or trapped in a body.  They don’t even understand that they have a body.  All they know is feelings, how things feel.  If they are hungry, or in pain, they cry.  However, they have no sense that it is a bodily condition which is causing their discomfort.  All they know, all they are, is a feeling at a particular time.   

Being in a body is an interpretation that infants learn as they grow and discover their bodies.   In other words, our physical body is something that we’ve learned:  we’re not born with it.  Learning how to operate without a body – unlearning what we learned as infants – is what astral projection is all about:  operating outside the box of the physical body.  Astral projection is a technique (or better said:  a cognitive process) predicated upon the realization that the physical body has no objective existence.  The physical body is a cognitive interpretation we have learned to make, and astral projection is based upon an alternative interpretation.    The interpretation that we have a physical body is merely a belief, exactly like the interpretation that we have a body while we’re dreaming is merely a belief.   Being awake is in fact nothing more than a highly evolved and specialized form of dreaming.  Waking consciousness has evolved over millions of years, since the first multi-cellular beings appeared on the earth.  Therefore it has a lot of stability and momentum behind it.  When we’re awake, it really seems real.   The physical body really seems solid.   When you bang it, it really hurts.    In fact, however, the physical body is merely a solider illusion – a more encompassing, more persistent, more convincing illusion – than the body that we have in dreams.  We adults have a much more sharply defined and delineated sense of selfhood than infants do – by which self is meant (body-centered) lower self.   The difference between Higher Consciousness and lower self is that Higher Consciousness says:  “This happened”, whereas lower self says:  “This happened to me.”  Our sense of our having a lower self – a central “me” to which things happen – actually consists of nothing more than self-pity.   

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